Apples, Gnomes and Suns - Eighth Layer News - October 2000

CONTENTS

Introduction

Eighth Layer News

Not in The Fine(?) Manual

IT Business in the South West

Industry News

Recommended Web Sites

Subscription Details

==========================================

Introduction

One item from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing" (A Compaq

publication) reminded me how fast technology has been moving.

The article pointed out that the latest Apple G4 cube has a peak

performance of over a billion floating point operations a second. This

performance is about the same as a Cray C90 processor, the processor of

the world's fastest computer in 1991. Most impressive for me was the

fact that the Apple doesn't have a fan to keep it cool.

For comparison when I worked at the Meteorological Office, Cray

installations required structural alterations to your building for

cooling systems to be installed, and the weather forecast was run on

only three processors, leaving the other 13 to handle tasks like

calculating the effects of global warming.

==========================================

Eighth Layer News

Down here in Devon I've been taking it easy, so lots of fun things to

write about.

This is the first issue of Eighth Layer Newsletter being sent on an

unmetered Internet connection. Details of my conversion, and information

on various schemes to get UK calls unmetered (including one by Severn

Trent Water!), and BT's new offer can be found on www.unmetered.org.uk.

A new client came onboard with some Linux networking work.

Lots of time was spent learning further intricacies of Linux kernels, as

well as looking at Netscape Communicator on Linux.

==========================================

IT Business in the South West of England

************************************

Kind of local news - Nortel Networks has won another large contract.

This time Cable and Wireless are outsourcing the deployment and running

of their global telecoms network to Nortel. As well as C&W transferring

all their voice traffic onto a new IP backbone - many telecoms analysts

have said it makes sense now voice is a minority traffic to shoehorn

voice into datacoms rather than the other way around.

Given the size of the contract, I'm not sure this is as much of the C&W

owned infrastructure as the Nortel press releases imply. still, C&W seem

to be divesting themselves of many key traditional telephone network

responsibilities (and in some cases, companies!) - and I'd be interested

in readers' views on where it is going.

==========================================

Industry News

************************************

Linux Kernel 2.4 Delayed

http://news.excite.com/news/zd/001016/08/growing-pains-slow

The long awaited Linux 2.4 Kernel release is likely to slip beyond the

end of this year. The 2.4 release will greatly increase the scalability

of the operating system as well as adding support for lots of new

hardware.

For details of what will be included check; http://www.linuxhq.com/

************************************

SUN adopts GNOME

Glad as I was once that HP won a standards battle and UNIX vendors

standardised on the Common Desktop Environment (CDE or HP-VUE, as it was

once known), I'm happy to mention that SUN have now changed this and

announced their intent to adopt the GNOME.

This will be late news for some of you as I missed the initial

announcement. SUN intend to have a version of GNOME for Solaris with

backward compatibility for their CDE applications by the middle of 2001.

GNOME is the dominant Linux desktop and has been one of the larger Open

Source projects. The GNOME project diverged from the KDE project (A CDE

clone - despite the FAQ claims to the contary) over a licensing issue

that has since been resolved, but alas by the time of the resolution the

projects had diverged too far.

Anyway, Eighth Layer will be switching from KDE to GNOME.

************************************

GNOME adopts SUN's Star Office

Well the headline doesn't describe the whole story. GNOME has created a

foundation to support the expected increased management activities,

whose officers will be elected at the start of November.

SUN has open-sourced the Star Office code for version 6 (Current release

is 5.2).

The SUN press release reads as though the adoption of Star Office by the

GNOME development community has already happened, although I suspect the

reality will be a bit more complex, the GNOME developers having put a

lot of effort into building their own cross platform office suite, and

some architectural aspects of Star Office need reworking for GNOME

purists.

I guess things will become clearer after November, when the officers are

elected.

http://www.openoffice.org/

http://foundation.gnome.org/

==========================================

Recommended Web Sites

************************************

HP Trusted System

One FAQ is what is the difference between HP trusted and untrusted

modes.

HP have written a short document outlining the differences.

HP Document ID: 2100067383

http://www.itrc.hp.com

*************************************

Secure that HP-UX Box

Another set of instructions for securing HP-UX boxes gleaned from the HP

newsgroup. This time 10.20 - lots of useful tips.

http://secinf.net/info/unix/secureHP-UX.html

*************************************

Administering multiple HP-UX Boxes

One of HP's best kept secrets is that they made a tool for administering

large numbers of HP's available for free when they launched HP-UX 11.

Also check out Ignite-UX.

http://software.hp.com/scmgr

==========================================

Subscription Details

Eighth Layer News subscription is still done the old fashion way by

hand.

The newsletter is free, and you are welcome to pass it on to colleagues,

but please do encourage them to subscribe, so I know who I'm writing

for.

To subscribe or unsubscribe e-mail

Simon.Waters@eighth-layer.com

Archive copies are kept on the website

http://www.eighth-layer.com/

Business http://www.eighth-layer.com/

Personal http://www.wretched.demon.co.uk/